bestiary

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. A medieval collection of stories providing physical and allegorical descriptions of real or imaginary animals along with an interpretation of the moral significance each animal was thought to embody. A number of common misconceptions relating to natural history were preserved in these popular accounts.

n. A modern version of such a collection.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. A medieval treatise of various real or imaginary animals.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. A treatise on beasts; esp., one of the moralizing or allegorical beast tales written in the Middle Ages.

"The bestiary really was the key element of the manuscript that intrigued me the most, not just because it has all these unpublished texts that are scholarly, but a bestiary is a book that is concerned with the symbolic meanings of animals," Gwara said.

Modern Jaguars still belong to what Roland Barthes calls the bestiary of power’, but they have evolved from a primitive to a classical form, a process first described in Barthes’s essay on the new Citron DS, written when it made its first dramatic appearance at the Paris Motor Show in 1955.

Once I'd waded through some rather peculiar photos and considered changing my plans from going to the zoo to seeing an altogether different kind of bestiary, I was quickly interrogating people about places to go and things to do.